EXCLUSIVE: Allbirds Launches ‘Moonshot Zero,’ the First Net Zero Carbon Shoe

Rhonda Richford
·5-min read

PARIS — San Francisco-based footwear company Allbirds is launching the world’s first net-zero carbon shoe with its limited-edition Moonshot Zero, first dropping Thursday.

They settled on the name Moonshot to describe the lofty goal, but also with the understanding that it is achievable with dedication. It’s stylized with zeros to convey the shoe’s carbon credentials.

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Creating a net-zero carbon shoe has long been a goal of the company, which is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year.

“This project, in some ways, is 10 years old,” said cofounder and chief innovation officer Tim Brown. “We founded Allbirds as a B Corp, a belief that there was a generational shift and an understanding of the importance of caring for the environment, and that the fashion industry had been playing lip service to a problem.…The idea has never changed, and that was about innovating from nature.”

To do so, they sourced wool from a single location of the Lake Hawea Station in New Zealand, which uses regenerative farming practices and carbon sequestration. The company used independent carbon certification to assess the footprint of the farm, then calculated the carbon intensity of the wool to a product level value. All of that takes into consideration how much carbon is sequestered on the farm through management of forest and native plants.

It’s a different approach than the company has taken in the past, with a bigger picture of the wool’s carbon intensity value, Allbirds believes.

Allbirds started labeling all its products with the item’s carbon footprint in 2020, the same year they launched a partnership with Adidas to create the lowest carbon performance shoe that either brand had ever produced. That project was a “catalyst,” said Brown, and Allbirds wanted to see just how low they could go — to zero.

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“We’ve made something with everything that we have, tapping into every decimal point, every contact, every connection, all the way back down to scope three on the farm. And we’ve made a product imbued with a design language that is that is connected to sustainability,” said Brown.

The black slip-on boot design incorporated more of the regenerative wool into the design from the jump, while minimizing other, more carbon-intense materials. Moonshot Zero also features a bio-based midsole foam; methane-capture bioplastic, and sugarcane-derived, and carbon-negative Green PE packaging.

“More than anything else, what’s been fascinating about this project is it has been design-led,” said Brown. “The creativity is born from constraints.…It already has implications for every other object that we make.”

Allbirds Moonshot Zero
Allbirds Moonshot Zero

Following the successful partnership with Adidas, Brown hopes that Allbirds’ work can spur better practices throughout the industry. For example, when the company made the formula for its SweetFoam sugarcane-sourced material available, 100 companies adopted its use.

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So the company has created an open-source tool kit about the Moonshot Zero development process available for other brands.

“For the progressive conversation for the broader fashion industry, this had to be about sharing,” said Brown. He hopes the shoe and its specs can spark conversation in the industry.

“We’re naïve to think that objects and products and services that we use are going to miraculously disappear. We’re going to stop consuming them. We need to reimagine them from the molecules up, from the fiber up, with an understanding of the name of the farmer — and hopefully this is an example. It’s a starting point and hopefully an example for others to follow,” he said.

“This isn’t just about this shoe. This isn’t just about us. It’s about showing that opportunity for every type of company to think really critically about a problem and solution, and how to share learnings and share motivations and really try to scale these solutions with the world,” said director of sustainability Aileen Lerch.

However, the company is clear to focus on detail and not position it as a “sustainable” shoe, since the word can be confusing to consumers, is losing impact and doesn’t necessarily affect purchasing habits against the current economic backdrop.

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Even if consumers are more aware than ever of the impacts of climate change, there is a lot of “confusion around a word and concept like sustainability that also, certainly in an American context, feels like it’s a word that’s out of fashion,” said Brown, noting that it has become “politicized.”

Such a sentiment reinforces the team’s commitment to transparency, to help foster consumer understanding.

“We know people care and people are confused, and there’s a lot of different information. And so an approach that we’ve really tried to take over the years and took with Moonshot also is sharing different levels of information” from farm to the store shelf, added Lerch.

While a lot of the discourse in fashion is about recycling plastic into clothing, he hopes people can connect with the concept of regenerative farming. “We need to tell these stories. We need to understand that more than anything else, the answers to our problems in the future lie in the past in our connection with nature, oftentimes in practices,” said Brown.

“There’s a lot of value in how do we present many types of different information, touch points, and ultimately the goal here is bringing everyone along on the journey,” added Lerch.

The Moonshot Zero will be available in a limited-edition run of 500 numbered pairs at the Allbirds stores in New York, London, and Dubai this week; in Seoul April 1, and roll out to Tokyo later this spring.

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